A couple years ago, I attended a lecture by the lead designer for the Diamondbacks’ current uniforms. The lecture wasn’t strictly about designing for professional sports, but since the team’s new jerseys had just been unveiled, he did talk about it at some length.

Although there were several good reasons for choosing red jerseys (teal and purple is fairly dated, no other team in the NL west wears red, the red rock landscape of northern Arizona) the ultimate color decision came down to market research. According to his firm (and he had some lovely slides, with bar-graphs and everything, to back this up) red jerseys sell better than any other color. Even setting aside comparisons between one team and another (where team popularity makes a big difference), red color-schemes were good for about 10% greater sales of licensed merchandise.

It’s interesting to see that this isn’t always the case, especially when a team violates its own identity to shoehorn in a red jersey. “It that the Pirates? Really?” was my first response to the red vests. I’m glad they’re opting for something else this year.

They should go for the powder blue like the throwback pens jerseys

Jersey style is important to maintain tradition and contunity. Although the Pirates haven’t had must of a winning tradition in the past 16 years or so but it’s nice to see them wearing the same jersey styles as Maz and Clemente (early in his career) wore.

Think about those classic teams and logos: the old English ‘D’ of Detroit, Yankee ‘NY’ and pinstripes, the Cardinals ‘Bird on the Bat,’ there’s a reason why they haven’t been changed.

The color red being added to the Pirates colors a few years ago is part of my theory on team colors.  My theory is all teams subconsciously want to be wearing red and black and will be tweaking their colors until that point.